With all due respect to Northern Albertans who want a runway kept open for medevac flights at Edmonton’s City Centre airport, get over it. It’s not going to happen. It shouldn’t happen.

The airport is closing in bits and pieces throughout this year to make way for thousands of homes near the heart of the city. Get used to it. It should have happened 10 or 15 years ago.

After city residents voted in 1995 to consolidate all passenger flights at the International, the hope was that cargo, charters and medevac would soon follow. But none of the players – the airports authority, city council and the province – could ever bring themselves to turn off the landing lights.

The provincial government liked the location because while the rest of us had to drive to Leduc to fly to Calgary, provincial politicians just had to go up the road from the Legislature to catch government planes.

Medevac flyers liked it because it was nearer the Royal Alex and U hospitals than the International is.

About a decade ago when the Edmonton Regional Airports Authority last tried to seal the doors at City Centre, its executives pleaded with journalists to help them build popular support for an end to the remaining regional passenger flights from places such as Grande Prairie, Fort McMurray and Lethbridge.

“But given that the 1995 referendum authorized you to shut down those flights years ago, who authorized them to continue?” I asked.

Basically the response was “Um, well, we did.”

So I feel some sympathy for Northern Albertans who are frustrated with the closure that will begin next month when the runway used by fixed-wing medevac planes goes dark.

First we Edmontonians said we would keep the place open (1992 plebiscite), then we said we’d close it. Then we let it stay open anyway, even though we claimed we were ready to pull the plug on the radar and rip up the asphalt.

Even on this latest occasion, on which we finally seem to mean business, neither the city nor province provided residents of northern communities with details about what was happening or when. The announcements were simple dropped on them last fall.

But sympathy or not, it is the right thing to do to close City Centre and start construction of the new Blatchford neighbourhood. The new development will allow our booming city to add thousands of new homes without adding another suburb.

The Save Our Medevac Service Society (SOS) of northern communities claims the plans made to accommodate 3,000 mercy flights at Edmonton International are inadequate, that lives will be jeopardized due to the added time it will take to get patients to city hospitals.

Both STARS air ambulance and Alberta Health Services’ ambulance planes will move in March to a state-of-the-art facility at the International that includes a six-patient urgent-care facility. Ambulances will be on standby there to rush the most critical patients to hospital.

While SOS likes to point to an Alberta Health Quality Council study that says 1,800 of the 3,000 annual flights are “time critical,” what it seldom mentions is that most of those flights are for scheduled appointments, not life-threatening emergencies. Most really sick or injured patients are already being taken directly to hospital helipads from northern hospitals or accident sites.

According to the city, fewer than 150 of the patients arriving at City Centre each year are on the brink of death. Surely added STARS flights can be added to give them the best chance of surviving.

Perhaps if the city and province had done a better job providing northern residents with information, there would be less fear now. Yet fear or not, the closure is going ahead.

Runway for medevac flights won't happen

With all due respect to Northern Albertans who want a runway kept open for medevac flights at Edmonton’s City Centre airport, get over it. It’s not going to happen. It shouldn’t happen.

The airport is closing in bits and pieces throughout this year to make way for thousands of homes near the heart of the city. Get used to it. It should have happened 10 or 15 years ago.

After city residents voted in 1995 to consolidate all passenger flights at the International, the hope was that cargo, charters and medevac would soon follow. But none of the players – the airports authority, city council and the province – could ever bring themselves to turn off the landing lights.

The provincial government liked the location because while the rest of us had to drive to Leduc to fly to Calgary, provincial politicians just had to go up the road from the Legislature to catch government planes.